Hands-on: AnyGlove review... Turn any glove into a touchscreen glove

Firebox has introduced AnyGlove to the UK, a liquid that, when applied to any pair of gloves regardless of material, turns them into capacitive touchscreen gloves. You will be able to text and control your smartphone or tablet using your own favourite or work gloves, without having to buy a new special pair.

The bottle it comes in is fairly unassuming. It's a small plastic bottle that looks like the sort of thing that people who wear contact lenses carry around with them. Inside are 550 drops of the AnyGlove solution, which the company says should be enough to treat several pairs of gloves. Plus, one application should last weeks if not months.

The liquid inside is a greyish black colour, so do be aware that it might discolour light-coloured gloves. It has a faint odour during application, but that fades completely when it is fully dry.

Pocket-lint was sent a bottle of AnyGlove, so we applied it to a pair of Penguin by Munsingwear black woollen gloves. But because we're impatient, we tested the fastest way to have the product up and running.

First, we applied the amount of solution recommended in the included, detailed instructions. You need to be fairly heavy handed (pardon the pun) and ensure that each fingertip is well coated. You then have to rub finger and thumb together, and we found that the side benefit to this is that the thumb print ended up well coated too, without further application.

You do this while wearing the gloves, so if your gloves are particularly porous, like our woollen ones, you will need to wash your hands fairly sharpish as the liquid will go through them if you've done it properly.

The AnyGlove instructions suggest that you then dry the gloves thoroughly. This will take up to three hours if you're just hanging them out to dry, and 30 minutes in a tumble dryer (don't accidentally put them on a wash cycle at this point, although they can be washed after and retain their capacitive properties). We took the quickest option, however, and used a hair dryer. This took approximately four minutes.

And it worked first time. Well, mostly. On the fingers where we applied the most solution, it was like using our fingers on an iPhone 5 screen directly. On others it didn't work so well.

In that case, AnyGlove recommends a second application. We think that we were probably a bit too cautious as it was the first time with the liquid. The company also suggests that you will need to add further coatings on leather, waterproof and very thick gloves, but there's plenty of solution in the bottle to do so.

A little while later and our glove, naturally, still works. We can even use pinch and zoom using the forefinger and thumb. And there is no physical sign that our favourite woollen gloves are any different. So, major thumbs up.

AnyGlove is available on Firebox.com now for £19.99. Once applied, it works with any kind of capacitive touchscreen, iPhone, iPad, Android and more.